Catharine Garner made contact with Soroptimist International London Chilterns Region in January 2025. She was looking for sponsorship for her 13 year old daughter, who had been selected by the English Schools Swimming Association (ESSA) to represent England in the World School Games in Serbia in April. This is an enormously prestigious event, effectively the World Championships for schools, and there are usually around 35 countries taking part. A contribution of £1,750 per athlete was required! The Region’s Executive decided to donate £100 to help Mia get closer to her fundraising goal.
We received the letter below at the end of April – clearly the experience had been of massive benefit to Mia’s personal development. It sounds as if she has a great future ahead of her. You will also be able to see from the photo that we gained some publicity for Soroptimists from our support. We hope that at some point in the future we may be able to hear from Mia in person about her experience at a Region event, but the schedule of events for young athletes like Mia is extremely full as you can probably imagine!
NB: Both photographs shown here were from Mia’s mother Catharine who gave us permission to use them.
Dear wonderful sponsors of Mia,
It’s taken me a little time to be able to do it, but I wanted to put together some words of heartfelt thanks for your kind support of Mia during her trip to Serbia. We all came back to the UK on 13th April, and we were then plunged into a hectic round of galas. It’s currently the qualifying window for British Summer Championships, and Mia has not stopped swimming since we landed – including an away meet in Norwich over the Easter weekend – and now we are in the middle of London Regionals with more to come!
I wanted to let you know that the English Schools team was nothing less than superlative, and I’m delighted to say that England came top of the swimming medals table. This really was no mean feat, as there were some extremely fast swimmers there. Brazil, Thailand, Mexico, Serbia, Ukraine and the USA all fielded larger and very fast teams, and Brazil in particular had winning in their sights. They did, in fact, win the overall Gymnasiade, so we were even more pleased to be able to fend them off in swimming.
As for Mia herself, she had a fantastic experience. She managed to swim personal bests in very nearly all her events, despite a challenging pool, and would ordinarily have made finals, except that there was a cap on the number of people from each country who could compete in finals. With Mia not being at the top of the age group, 2 “big girls” got in ahead of her!
Equally important as the swimming, though, were the exceptional swimmers she met and bonded with as team-mates; the experience of travelling abroad to compete and then having to prepare to be at your best away from home, with all that that entails; the chance to meet like-minded athletes from all over the globe (and swap kit with them! – Mia came home with shirts from USA, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina and I don’t know how she managed it!); and the very valuable opportunity of being coached by selected performance coaches, who have started to prepare them all for what will hopefully be significant international careers.
Altogether, it was a truly unique and incredibly valuable experience, and of course it would not have been possible without your support. We would like to say a heartfelt thank you to you, and we hope we have done you proud!
Very best wishes,
Cathy and Mia Garner